December started with #318, another stock C scale mahogany banjo that is shown on the Banjos page. Banjo #319 started as a custom rim and tone ring job and ended up as a whole banjo. It is my first banjo with a 13″ pot. The customer sent a box of flooring offcuts of reclaimed old growth pine, and I made them into the rim and armrest. The customer wanted to show the original marks from when the pine was still beams, so I included some of the holes in the armrest and rim cap instead of cutting so as to avoid them. The neck is curly maple. The pine was a little harder to work with than the hardwoods I normally use, as the pitch would load up the sandpaper pretty heavily, but it seems to work fine and this pine was as heavy as some of the hardwoods can be. I don’t know how to assess the sound of the pine specifically, as there was an Electric type tone ring on top of the pine, and a goat skin head, which both would also contribute to it.

#320 was my last banjo of 2023. It was a custom order, made from cherry, with a full fretboard and a Dobson tone ring. The post office got clogged up and the Dobson was delayed for a few days, so I had to borrow one off #315 to fit the rim to, and then hope that the new one would identical in size, which it luckily turned out to be. 

My other instrument project in December was fiddle #29, a cherry chicken head which is shown on the Fiddles page. It is the second one of the two necks I carved while camping at Middle Saranac Lake in early October, and I’m hoping to get another walnut and a curly maple fiddle made in the next month or two.  Right now I am making an unusual rim for a customer, and have three stock banjos, two C scales and an A scale, that will be ready soon. After that I am going to make a walnut 17″ archtop guitar to replace the one that was sold in December, and I hope to also make an octave mandolin this month.

In non-instrument news I finally got the last of the high shelves that I have had in mind for more than a year made for the house, and also put in the range hood that I got for the kitchen stove in October. The big ones in the kitchen will get some floating shelves at some point, but for now there’s not a lot in them yet. I couldn’t back up quite far enough to fit all four in the picture. The smaller ones in the living room make it so I can store quite a few more stock instruments in a safe and out of the way place. At present I don’t have enough on hand to fill them, but I did run out of room for a while on the other shelf and the hangers in the stairway a few weeks ago. There is still more trim and detail work to be done in the house, but the big things are pretty much in place now.